DEFLOCKICIDE?! Both Flock Cameras at Florida Gun Range Are DOWN #FlockCameras #DeFlockFlorida

Our Take

Credit to the Daytona Beach Lawyer channel for doing what good watchdog journalism does: going back to the scene and documenting what's actually there instead of speculating from a desk. What he found — two Flock units at a public shooting range apparently melted, burned, or otherwise destroyed — is the kind of image that spreads fast precisely because it captures a growing public mood. We're not in the business of cheering property destruction, and neither does the video claim to know what happened. But the fact that a federal forest gun range needed license-plate tracking cameras on vehicles going in and out in the first place is the real story here, and it's one a lot of Floridians are clearly unhappy about.

That unease isn't paranoia. ALPR networks like Flock's were sold to small towns and county agencies as narrow crime-fighting tools, then quietly expanded into blanket surveillance of everyone who drives anywhere near them — including, apparently, people exercising their Second Amendment rights on federal land. Nobody consented to having every trip to the range logged, timestamped, and stored in a database that can be queried by other agencies, sold to data brokers, or breached. Whether these two cameras died of a malfunction or something more deliberate, the underlying question for Ocala and every other community is why this hardware was installed with so little public debate to begin with.

If you want to know whether there's a Flock camera watching your own commute, check our camera map, and if you're ready to push back at a city council meeting or county commission hearing, our take-action page has the tools to help you do it the right way — through public records and public pressure, not guesswork about melted plastic.